Review: Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter (360)

Serious Sam is a very old-school FPS, there’s no proper plot to speak of as the enemy A.I. boils down to running at you, or if they happen to have a weapon it involves running at you while firing. There’s no tactical aspect to speak of, no cover system, no regenerating health, nothing that makes it even resemble any of the cookie cutter FPS games that arrived after Halo. To make it clear, none of this is a bad thing, the game is fun, frantic, and surprisingly good fun in co-op, but to put it bluntly, it’s old. This is the same exact game that was released nine years ago for the PC, and it shows.

Despite arriving after Half-Life, Serious Sam is more reminiscent of the Doom era FPS titles. There is no enemy A.I. to speak of but the challenge doesn’t come from outwitting the enemy, rather survival is the key. While the enemies aren’t geniuses, they make up for this in sheer numbers. As you plough your way through the levels, which are all extremely linear (in a good way) with only the occasional arena area to stop you from moving forward, you will at times have hundreds of enemies on screen bearing down on you, sometimes while in the middle of massive boss encounters. To win, you simply have to kill every single thing that appears on screen. Thank God for the generous auto-aim, over-powered weapons and plentiful amounts of ammo.

There’s something refreshing about a game that does this, considering the FPS genre is filled with Halo and Half-Life clones, and quite frankly there are few sounds as terrifying in gaming as the scream of THOSE headless suicide bombers. But at the same time it serves as a reminder as to why the genre has gone that way. Serious Sam HD is fun, but only in small doses. You will kill relentlessly a lot of the time and you’ll soon get tired of it. Gamestyle would recommend only playing for about half an hour or less at a time because of this. Not only is this the best way to get maximum enjoyment out of the game, it will sort of cover the fact that it can be completed anywhere between two to four hours on the lower difficulty.

There is some replay value in it though. If you can manage to get four friends together over Live, you can play the entire campaign in co-op. This is actually rather good fun, especially if you ramp up the difficulty, but in all respects to Croteam, it isn’t going to replace Gears of War, Halo, or Left 4 Dead series in our co-op games of choice. Maybe if they had managed to allow 16 player co-op like on the PC version, but we assume the limit is down to Xbox Live more than anything. Besides, we doubt 15 other people on your friends list would have bought this anyway.

The only real difference between this remake and the original is the graphics, and even saying that they’re not that good. The game runs smoothly, textures are nicely done and the difference between this and it’s predecessor is definitely noticeable, but you’ll have to ask yourself are those shiny guns worth £12 in Microsoft Points considering you can get the original game PC game for £3, including postage, on eBay? Gamestyle thinks that for some people it will be, and if you haven’t played the game before this is probably the best version to get. However if you have played it before there’s no real reason to play it again unless you’ve lost the disc or really feel in the mood for a bit of nostalgia.

Do you want a no holds barred, no brainer and almost textbook definition of “old school” FPS to play? If so, go ahead and make the purchase. It really is a game you have to be in the mood for to play and enjoy. Just don’t go in with any expectations above shinier graphics.

Rating: 6 / 10

Words by Garry Webber